Lost villages

Why are there so many abandoned villages in the UK? Inspired by this call for imagery of lost settlements in connection with the forthcoming Times Atlas of Britain. A new print atlas is a hard sell in the age of online mapping, but physical maps are so much more satisfactory than digital ones, partly because they age, hard-wired with history. There’s a long, unillustrated list of abandoned places, with pithy little histories as to why their populations were (sometimes forcibly) uprooted and removed, sacrificed to war and technology.